


The High Places

by crowleyshouseplant (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Gen, Original Character - Freeform, Supernatural - Freeform, angels and fish, anna milton - Freeform, castiel - Freeform, deerstiel, uriel - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:18:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anael and Uriel visit Sodom and Gomorrah.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The High Places

She’s tiny, curled between the rocks, fragile bones hard under skin that’s dry, peeling, pocked with sores. Anael bends over her, sees the wavering spark of her soul, struggling for air.

 _Hello?_

Uriel has already found a vessel. He holds his hand in front of his face, stretches out his fingers, clenches them into fists. Makes the joints and bones pop, like he wants to break them but can scarcely take the time to heal them.

“Hurry up,” he says, words thick on his tongue. He spits on the ground. “We don’t belong here. With them.” He toes the mud his spit has made, scowling.

 _Are you there?_   
Anael whispers into her ear.

The girl’s eyes flicker, and she holds out her hand, palming the air, and if Anael were anything but a wavelength of celestial intent, the girl would have touched, would have seen, would have felt something—

but there’s nothing but air cut by the wind’s cold edge. Blue settles deeper into the girl’s lips, marbles the arches of her feet.

“I can hear you,” the girl says, voice just barely scraping through your teeth.

 _Let me in._

“Come on,” Uriel says, snapping his fingers.

The girl pulls herself closer together. “Why?”

 _Because I can help you. I can heal you. I can make you warm again. I can fill your belly. I can do all these things—you just have to say yes._

“You can’t do all that,” the girl says. “Nobody can do all that.”

 _Have faith, Hannah._

“How do you know my name?”

 _God knows the name of all his children and we are his angels._

Hannah narrows her eyes, shifts them away to the ground, tongue between her teeth. “But if I say yes, then I won’t be hungry. I’ll be warm. Things will be better.”

 _I promise._

“Then yes,” the girl says, her voice flat.

And Anael funnels her essence into the girl, eases herself between joints and cartilage, burns away the pain with the fire of her grace, suffuses her skin, healing the sores. And when they stand upon their legs, their muscles hold firm and strong, the tatters of their cloth repaired without a single needle stitch.

“We have a city to smite—why did you bother?” Uriel says, turning away, striding down the street towards the home of the man named Lot. “She’s not going to survive anyway. She’s not one of the faithful.”

“Be quiet,” Anael says with Hannah’s mouth. But her feet don’t move and she doesn’t want to move and she wants to be far, far away from the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

 _I suppose a lot of people wouldn’t make sure that someone died comfortable_   
, Hannah says.

Anael in Hannah’s body stumbles against the wall of a building, dirt crumbling under her fingertips, pressure shoving grit up under her nails.

It is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as how Hannah’s gut kicks, twisting under her skin, and how something foul-tasting slicks her throat, and how she wants to collapse in on herself, skin folding in against skin, swallowing her completely, so that she doesn’t have to be here, so that she doesn’t have to look at the faces of the people buying bread, waiting on doorsteps, laboring in the forge and the fields, of people pressed close together, moving together, dancing together, skin against sweat-silked skin.

“What are you doing?” Anael says with Hannah’s voice—more breath than sound.

Uriel does not look back.

 _Nothing_   
.    
_This is all you. Though, once you’ve managed to pull yourself together again, I’d like to see my parents again before you destroy everyone. I can see it in there—your orders to kill God’s children._

Hannah laughs then, and it’s not pretty—it’s a frozen river and it cuts deep even though Anael is grace and there’s nothing to cut, even though she burns hot and it’s not possible for an angel to be cold. “Your parents are dead,” Anael says.

 _And you’re an angel of the lord,_   
 Hannah says.    
_I’m sure you can manage one small miracle._

“Will it go away? This—this feeling if I do?” and Anael scratches at the skin with her nails, as if she could only look under the skin, then she would find the sickness stuck to her, needling the grace that has fused itself to every nerve.

 _I guess it depends on you—_

But Anael doesn’t wait for Hannah to finish—she folds time and space around her because time is newborn, flexible, still too young to crystalize into its patterns—and they are no longer in a town stinking with unrighteousness—

— _It’s not unrighteousness, it’s just dung and vomit and sick over everything—_

and they stand on a ribbon of shoreline, pebbles digging into the arches of their feet, waves lapping at their toes, chasing puffs of foam blown along with the wind.

The fish are walking out of the water, heaving themselves onto the sand for the first time. And the angels are there, and they are watching, and one of them, Castiel, approaches closer, grace outstretched and reaching—

—and Anael stumbles after, feet splashing in the surf, and she cries, “Don’t step on that fish, Castiel—big plans for that fish—” and Hannah’s hands scoop up the fish, palms wet and streaked with salt as Hannah marvels  _This is me? This is where I came from—_

Even as Castiel turns towards them, his grace refracting and splintering from the water on the shore, the water in Hannah’s eyes, and then they are no longer there on the soft sand, waves tugging at their ankles, but falling to their knees on the hard streets of the city, already clouding over, fire in the air.

Something—no someone—extracts Anael from Hannah, reels her from Hannah’s marrow, as if someone has hooked their thumbs in her ears and wrenched upwards—

And Hannah’s mouth is open, muscles seizing with weeded grace, uprooted from her toes and her stomach and her eyes until Anael is gone and Hannah collapses, a husk of bone and skin, shaking and trembling as fire rains from the sky.

 **Anael**

Anael calls to Castiel, the only one who had turned to them, reached for them, and pleads with him to please save Hannah, to make it stop—and she pretends not to hear when Castiel says,  _I’m forbidden to take a human vessel—_ and when Anael is brought before Gabriel, she pleads for the city, for Hannah, and Gabriel does nothing either for the city or to Anael for her disobedience—but still does not let her return.

 **Hannah**

The angel had said it wouldn’t hurt, that she would be warm—but she’s not warm, not anymore. And she feels like her entire stomach has been ripped from her. Like she’s so empty she’ll never be filled up again even if she could stuff herself at a merchant’s table. Like she’s torn up and broken, like some rag doll with the seams all undone. She was safe, for a little while, but now there’s fire everywhere and there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from the stampeding people, nowhere to find air that’s not stuffed with smoke and ash. And she thinks it would be better if she could hear them—if she could stop the blood from clogging up her ears—but all she can feel is the thud-thud of their feet beneath her own, and the city trembles and shakes from them and from the fire and nothing is safe no not anywhere.

“Anael!” Hannah shouts even though her tongue is clumsy. “I have faith!” Because Anael didn’t have to show her the ocean with the fish, that thing that nobody had seen with human eyes but her. And she didn’t have to heal the sores on her limbs or heal the tears in her clothes but she did anyway. She didn’t have to do anything—so she could save her if she wanted. “I have faith in you!” and she’s terrified that she wouldn’t even be able to hear Anael because of the blood in her ears and her body shudders as a sob scuds against her rib cage, against her throat, and everything hurts like it hadn’t when Anael was with her.

And then Hannah sees her—the hind looking at her with her wide soft eyes as she picks her way through the ruins of the city, threads her way through the rivers of people struggling for salvation.

The hind approaches closer and Hannah cannot move, transfixed by the unblinking eyes, the way her skin doesn’t even shiver even though every muscle in Hannah’s body shudders and begs for safety. The deer snuffles Hannah’s hand, licks at her palm, and Hannah grips the deer by her shoulder and stumbles after on wrecked limbs, empty and hollow now that there’s no angel to walk in her feet along a shoreline, until the deer kneels beside her and Hannah climbs on top of her, arms looped around her neck as she takes her far, far away, to the mountains, to the high places looking down upon the city.

Hannah slides from the hind’s back, shiny with sweat, and they watch the city burn. “Thank you,” Hannah says. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you—” like a chant because she could be down there, and the hind just looks at her, eyes big and wide, head tilted to the side, before she picks her way down the mountain.

But she stops beside a pillar—a pillar of salt, Hannah notices—vaguely human-shaped, she realizes with growing horror—

but the deer, she just walks up to it, reaches out, and licks a stripe across the statue’s forehead before turning away, disappearing into the shadows. 


End file.
